Category: physical thinking

My youngest daughter’s drawing (3 years old), but how I felt most of the semester.

This semester has resulted in a real community of support. My grad-cohort is awesome and most if not all the preliminary tools I need to make, write, create, put forth work and fail have been introduced to me in our “Foundations in Dance Research” course.

“Laban Systems: Movements, Methods, and Analytical Frameworks” has been a wonderful addition to the writing kind of making. Not only do I have a new treasure chest of descriptive words specifically crafted for movement, but also a new way to look at movement and a toolbox of sprinkles and ingredients to add to my movement-making process. “Aboutness” can be applied to my whole first semester here. Trying to frame and understand specifically what I am interested in is the “aboutness” of my work and my-artist-self.

My body feels strong and smart. I am articulate in my joints and muscles in a way that I haven’t been for a while and it feels amazing. Crystal Perkin’s Afro-Horton technique class was an integral part in this strength and agency as was my Pilates course. I was able to apply Pilates techniques in Crystal’s technique class. The integration of whole body movement in Pilates is something I am still working on but I now have a practice to bring with me for the next two years. Pilates challenged my self-motivation in multiple ways and Crystal’s class was my grounding force throughout the semester. Technique class is my home, I know how to be a dancer and trust the movement and my body, so once I gave into the discipline and physical effort, this class was healing and got me through other more tumultuous moments.

I believe the next two and a half years will result in a confident, strong, maker who can own her place in an academic setting. This department has a professionalism built into it that is transparent but also ingrained. Research is what you make it. Figuring out what specifically interests me is the hardest part. There seems to be a fine line between what I’m interested in and what falls flat. In this academic context, it’s about framing your questions and spending time figuring out your project and writing it down before you actually get to figure anything out. This backwards approach is difficult for me but a skill worth developing. It’s similar to grant writing, but with a different flavor I can’t quite place.

In the moments to come, I’m interested in exploring some new practices of making, perhaps more improvisatory or contact-based processes, perhaps some making with friends/current grads, perhaps some non-mandatory uses of technologies. I’m still working on what I’m interested in, who I’m interested in doing it with and how to get it done in this still new environment but I trust the process. At the end of the day, it’s about coloring inside and outside the lines. It’s about appreciating all approaches and angles but also figuring out where you fit into them, how to best apply them to help you grow and how you want to approach your own angles or angle your own approach.

Co-teaching grad students Josh Anderson and Gina Hoch-Stall opened their last Contact Improvisation class of the semester to the other students on Monday and it was a wonderful sharing of form, ability and spirit. The open class was an inclusive and attentive culmination to the semester. The warm atmosphere reminded me of the first time I had ever been to a Contact Jam, maybe…the summer of 2002 at American Dance Festival. Jenn Nugent and Paul Matteson were there in The Ark and perhaps David Dorfman. I remember being in awe of them flying through the air and across the space. The uncertainty of what was happening, the importance of each movement and the courage it took to try things out for myself amidst my heros and fellow newbies.

A bunch of years later it feels so different. Finally I am understanding the vibrant investigation of experimentation and how exciting it is when the unexpected happens. I feel like having children and also just being at the end of my 30’s has allowed me to let go of everyone else’s expectations and opinions of me so that I’m finally able to explore and be interested without thinking of others. Sometimes. It’s been a while since I’ve been to a Jam, but yesterday I found myself wanting to play with my new friends in a way that some old friends used to play. Connecticut’s Elm City Dance Collective taught me what I was relishing in last night: trust, play and surprise. I’m excited to find out that even in this still new environment I’m more interested in finding an unexpected conclusion than getting it “right” or indulging in every ounce of sensing what the other person’s weight is doing next. Or maybe I’m just impatient. Or as Josh has decided…”A bulldozer.” Maybe I’m finally ready to begin failing in order to find my edges.

A lovely moment with Emily of spritely play, a sitting discussion with Bita, a bombastic topsy-turvy interlude with Josh, an interruption of KJ and Yildiz’s tender moment and a rolling play with an unknown mover stay with me. Someone in the class described her experience as a hug that will allow her to achieve all her dreams this week. Me too.

This photo is a projection on the white floor of OSU Dance’s 50th Anniversary Concert. It is a Labanotation score.

Dance is about so many things.

Bebe Miller writes in Andrea Olsen’s “Between Brooklyn and Bearnstow: Translating through Dancing” the following notions about dance:

“Is it ever a repetition or is it a spiral cycle.” (Olsen, 32)

I am imaging a spiral cycle of something speeding up in time, or building or decreasing in intensity.

“There is a rise and fall, a breath, and there is a return.” (Olsen, 31)

It could be a repetition or just a movement in general. It could be the beginning or the end.

“I am less interested in technology as something to show. I am interested in what it changes about how we as humans in a community interact with it and because of it and alongside it.” (Olsen, 32)

There is something futurist about this statement. I think it is the ever-changing idea of technology. Is she interested about what changes when we interact with it? How does it change our interaction? Does the presence of technology change our interactions with others, like through Facebook and texting or is it because technology itself is continually changing? And if it’s continually changing than does Miller mean that as it changes and because it changes our interactions and relationships to it and with it are always changing and different? If so, this is also true of our relationship with our community within an environment built around and/or with technology. Or is it all these things?

Dance is what you make it. Dance is questioning interaction. Dance is questioning alignment, movement, orientation, space, time, flow and weight. Dance is thinking. Dance is taking care of those around you. Dance is embodiment and doing.

Saturday night I attended “TICKTOCK” a work-in-progress showing of Syren Modern Dance and The Ohio State University’s Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics (CCAPP) Visiting Fellow, Dr. Paul Sutter. The collaboration was sponsored by The STEAM Factory which is an Ohio State space fostering research relationships in a STEAM (Science, Technology, Education, Art and Math) custom. I was super excited to see the space and get to know what actually happens there. This is the first time there was an event of this kind open to the public (so I still don’t know what actually happens there) and it was engaging and the audience’s reaction was palpable.

The performance was inside a demonstration illustrating how Syren generally works choreographically, how the company sought out Dr. Sutter for his expertise in physics and how their collaboration unfolded. That’s a lot of hows…

Sutter is an avid speaker and has the radio show, Space Radio.* WCBE 90.5 hosted the event as a fundraiser. The first segment of the work they showed featured his speaking and walking around the performance area Morgan Freeman style in the “Through the Wormhole series” as the dancers narrated his words, “The faster you move in space, the slower you move in time.” Sutter varied this sentence repeatedly and the dancers organized in different ways demonstrating/acting out through movement what he was saying. He also told stories and the dancers gathered around his storytelling self before blasting off as characters traveling through space, illustrating different continuums, alluding to time-travel and multidimensional worlds. At one point the dancers even lift him up in a half-sitting position and float him across the space. All to illustrate different moments of time. If you haven’t surmised, the piece Syren and Dr. Sutter are creating together is about time.

They showed multiple sections. One section was created from physics action words that Kate St. Amand, co-director of Syren and choreographer for TICKTOCK, asked Sutter to come up with, such as rotation (which as discussed is about traveling less through time and more through space). Let’s just remember my affinity toward aboutness for a second. And we’re back.

The audience was given multiple opportunities to ask questions. At one point the dancers improvised the answers that Sutter was giving about questions such as, “Is there such a thing as a parallel universe? and “Is the discovery of time travel considered inevitable?” The dancers mirrored each other through space as Sutter described perpendicular multiple dimensions as a possibility more than parallel universes. This reminded me of Marvel’s The Flash. Sutter responded to the latter question explaining that time travel at this moment is considered impossible, but no one actually knows why. The ten year old next to me even asked a few completely succinct and thoughtful questions throughout the evening about the speed of light. The audience was energized and felt engaged and heard, you could feel it.

*He also hosted a segment this week with the Syren Modern Dance’s co-directors Kate St. Amand and Lynn Peterson.

Synchronous Objects examines William Forsythe’s “One Flat Thing” in ways I’ve never seen quantified. It’s an interface designed to visually represent connections through movements, improvisations and choreography. It’s as if the “making of” part of a movie was integrated with the performance in three different camera views. It allows the viewer to both decide what they want to hear and/or see and at the same time focus there attention on specific carves, arcs, weight, etc. through space.

You can also click through the creation process of the interface on the website, further deepening your understanding of the creation process. At the beginning of this web-experience the question, “What else might physical thinking look like?” pops up.

Wayne McGregor did a Ted Talk, “A Choreographer’s creative process in real time.” I was immersed in the familiar way the dancers were asked to perform newly synthesized movements and relationships. I immediately recognized the familiar assignments and the state of the dancers as they instantly synthesized physical thought. As the dancers moved from jittery (first learning and applying) to a little more integrated in the body only 5-minutes later, I thought, look at all the ways we can think with our bodies and how they move. Amazing.

I think this might be a running post as I continue to add examples of physical thought…

A short aboutness

Tara Burns is a performer, maker and educator currently pursuing an MFA in dance at The Ohio State University. Her current research involves investigating the intimacy of audience/performer gaze and the power dynamics of objects and people in space.